


Red Flag

by waltzmatildah



Category: Rookie Blue
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Crack and Angst, Dark Crack, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 09:31:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3351701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their first real date does <i>not</i> go as planned…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Flag

There are eleven thick white stripes delineating the pedestrian crossing that bisects Howard Road. Gail couldn’t tell you how she knows this, or why she knows this, but she definitely does. Know this. 

She rolls her eyes but doesn’t say anything, waits with barely restrained patience instead as Luke covers the extra few metres from his car to the crossing before making the ninety degree turn and heading in her direction. _Of course_ , she wants to laugh, _does_ laugh in the end, just a puff of white that mists in front of her face and then disappears as suddenly as it arrived.

There are eleven thick white stripes delineating the pedestrian crossing that bisects Howard Road.

Luke, letter-of-the-law Luke, with his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his shoulders lifting into a silent _hey there_ , has made his way across three and a half of them when a dirty, white utility starts and then never really stops a soundless slide that deposits him almost precisely at the fashionably scuffed toes of her brown boots. 

_Right then_

 

 

Gail’s taken countless witness statements before. A few years on the job and she thinks that could just about be a literal statement.

_Countless_

Most people talk about time standing still. Or about witnessing traumatic events happening in some distorted version of cinematic slow motion.

She blinks. Her hands are over her face. She knows this because she can feel them, not because she remembers putting them there. Her mittens are snow-damp, bright pink. She can see them in the brief snatches of time where her eyes are open, wide. Nothing happened in slow motion here.

 

 

Luke is moving. The car, having regained traction at some point following the collision, has become little more than a blinking set of tail lights at the closest corner where its driver is clearly vacillating between stopping and not. 

_Stopping_

It settles on not stopping at the same moment Gail’s knees meet the black ice by Luke’s left wrist. 

Luke is no longer moving. 

She reaches blindly, all instinct and very little conscious thought, for the radio strapped to the flat of her shoulder. _Officer down_ , she’s screaming, lips numb and thick as her jaw reluctantly accommodates the movements required to do this, _officer down_. Clumsily finds the leather strap of her handbag instead. She is not on duty. 

She is on a date. 

 

 

Gail’s rifling through her bag desperately, tossing gum and wads of Kleenex and myriad tubes of lip-gloss into the gutter as she digs for her cell phone, uses her teeth to free her fingers from her mittens in an attempt to call for help the conventional way.

_Luke_ , she’s saying now. The sound stuttering out like a solo drum beat from between her chattering teeth.

A voice answers her but she’s still just saying his name.

_Luke, Luke, Luke_

 

 

A stranger with the ability to form coherent sentences takes command of Gail’s phone. Leaves her to run her hands over Luke’s face, to monitor his pulse, to fiercely hold her own breath with every drawn out pause between his. She shrugs her way out of her jacket, throws it over him where he’s still motionless in the middle of the road, eyes closed, and red, red, red blood leaking sluggishly from a shallow gash on his forehead. 

And then suddenly he’s speaking to her. Trying to. A guttural rasp of, she suspects, largely random consonants and vows that may or may not sound something like her last name usually does.

_Peck_

And then he’s the opposite of motionless, moving to sit up, trying to slide an elbow underneath himself as leverage, and Gail’s pretty sure she says, _are you mad?_ at some point. Which doesn’t even sound like something she would say. It rings in her ears, foreign, like maybe she’s been watching too much British television.

Which wouldn’t necessarily be all that far from the truth.

 

 

She manages to hold him down relatively easily for the first forty odd rocking heartbeats, the flat of her palm against his shoulder enough to stall his admittedly half-hearted momentum. But then a single siren bleeds slowly into other background noises, gets louder, gets closer, and suddenly he’s using a fistful of her brand-new-maybe-kinda-bought-especially-for-today scarf to pull himself to seated before she can do anything but blink her eyelashes open then closed again; once, twice.

Luke swears softly, breathless, and the single word is enough to refocus her.

He’s not bleeding too badly, she thinks with a rush of relief, taking a quick inventory, at least, not visibly, not to her. There’s every chance a fractured pelvis has ruptured his femoral artery or his liver is now a pulverised mess, but she’s a barely-passed-rookie cop who swapped biology for criminology three weeks into her first semester at college all those years ago so…

She settles on, _he’s not bleeding out_ and hopes for the best. 

 

 

She keeps hearing him ask her what happened, _what happened, what happened, what happened_ , and the sirens that had been a distant wail keep getting louder, keep getting closer, and the soft snow that had been falling seems to have stopped now, leaving little more than the feathered ghost of his outline on the road. 

A slowly shifting shape that she can’t quite drag her attention from.

_I don’t really know_ , she finally manages, a non-answer that has his eyebrows pulling a little closer together.

Someone else answers for her and she fades out the details. Settles on the admittedly selfish notion that this was _not_ the way she’d planned to spend the afternoon.

A reflex of self-preservation as she giggles absurdly and has to clamp her own jaw shut mechanically, eyes wide, shocked.

_Sorry,_ she says.

 

 

Luke’s left knee, he tells her authoritatively, _is screwed_. And apparently he _did_ attend more than three weeks of biology in college.

Despite this, he still refuses an ambulance ride, shaking his head obstinately from side to side like a toddler might.

_No,_ he says, repeats it immediately, _no._

For emphasis perhaps.

She slides in behind him, deliberately scuffs up the snow ghost still flat against the black top as she pulls him back against her chest. The paramedics move in then, press a square of gauze to his forehead, and strap an oxygen mask over his face, and wrap the both of them up securely in tin foil, like they’re suddenly the mass-casualty disaster victims she wonders if, maybe, they were always destined to become.

 

 

_Peck and Callaghan_

 

 

_We’re on a date_ , she laughs again, the bubble of hysteria in her gut starting to pop and fizz. 

_Our first real date_

 

 

For all Luke’s adamant protests, they both end up with an ambulance ride. She jokes that at least he’s conscious for this one, and neither of them laugh and the young paramedic looks awkwardly shocked and Luke says;

_Yeah, it could have been worse_ , gesturing loosely in the direction of his injured knee, _it could have been two to the chest in my own living room…_

Gail almost chokes.

Luke takes another pull on the gas they’ve hooked him up with and doesn’t say another word until they arrive at the hospital.

When he then says;

_So, I guess this is us well and truly out of the closet, hey?_


End file.
